


I won't cross these streets until you hold my hand

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Except the last one, Gen, M/M, Phichuuri Week, Pre-Canon, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-11 11:04:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11147118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: Some things never leave a person.





	1. things we said when everything was going to hell

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [Tumblr](http://delicadenza.tumblr.com/tagged/phichuuri-week), in a slightly different order, for [Phichuuri Week 2017.](https://phichuuriweek.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Title from "Swing Life Away" by Rise Against, which is one of my favorite songs and so apt for my favorite boys.

Two hours ago his roommate had told him to go enjoy himself, enjoy the party, not to worry, he’d be fine right here—and Phichit had taken him at his word. But that had been two hours ago, and he’s just danced his way back into the living room to find the guy leaning against the bookshelf by the far wall.

Probably edged off the couch by the couple currently making out on it with a vengeance, Phichit surmises, and decides a rescue operation looks like more fun than another two hours of dancing.

“Want to ditch?” He leans in close and grins at the way Yuuri’s eyes widen.

“What’s that, sorry?”

“Kevin from your Accounting class is throwing up into a blender in the kitchen, and Laura from the rink’s got gum in her hair.” There had been a beer pong game out the back of the house that he’d briefly been part of, too, before the balls started flying off the table and into the bushes, but Yuuri’s definitely the kind of guy who’d be freaked out of his mind by the very idea of beer pong, so he doesn’t mention it. “I’m ready to go if you are.”

Yuuri bites his lip. Then he does that swishy up-and-down thing with his eyes that Phichit has noted he does when he’s nervous—down to his shoes and up to Phichit’s face and back again. His hand is shaking a little; Phichit sees the beer in it, likely lukewarm by now and still above the cup’s halfway mark, slosh from side to side.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure,” Phichit says. “C’mon.”

And then he reaches for the cup in Yuuri’s hand—the red plastic party cup that he never imagined existed outside bad American movies, the cup Yuuri’s barely drunk from and probably didn’t really want, even. He’s going to put it away, high up on top of the bookshelf, where no one can stumble into it and knock it over. And then they’ll get out of here, maybe grab some ice cream from the 7-11 across the street from their place.

“I can get that,” he says. Yuuri, uncurling his fingers, lets him.


	2. things we do in the dark

Yuuri knows they bought candles last week, when he heard the weather report on the TV in the locker room say there was a storm coming. He knows that he’d watched Phichit store them in the kitchenette, in the leftmost top drawer with the other emergency supplies—that he himself has opened that drawer at least once a day since then, to make sure they were still there.

But when he wakes to rain and thunder, and the wind keening between the buildings like the voice of a ghost in the distance, Yuuri cannot move. It’s as if the dark has destroyed the edges of things, his fixed notions of top and bottom, Yuuri’s body as separate from the mattress beneath his back, the bedroom as separate from the living room—all black before his eyes now, impossible to move through even with his hands outstretched in front to feel the way.

He blinks. Something moves; Yuuri can’t tell what. The mattress dips beneath an invisible weight. Outside the window—glass, brittle, too little protection from the rage Yuuri can hear on the other side—lightning, and for a heartbeat everything is illuminated.

Phichit’s face, the curve of his cheek, the angles at which his head bends and his neck joins his shoulders.

“Here, listen to this instead,” he says, and presses a pair of earbuds into the center of Yuuri’s palm. Involuntarily Yuuri’s fingers curl to grasp them, as at a lifeline.


	3. things we do when it's cold outside

“How could I have known winter would be like this? We’re always cold, aren’t we?”

Yuuri fusses, as he’s wont to do, and the fussing makes him frown. Phichit decides he likes the tiny wrinkle that frown makes between Yuuri’s eyebrows, just above where his glasses sit on the bridge of his nose. It’s funny—you’d think he was the one whose nose was about to fall off from the chill.

“It’s the wind that’ll get you, Phichit-kun.” Looking up, scanning the sky for snow, uncoiling the scarf from around his neck. It’s big and blue and fluffy, probably hand-knitted—a good scarf, though Phichit supposes he wouldn’t really know. “There’s no wind on the ice.”

Yuuri’s breath puffs out white and curling in the air as he sighs, like a cloud you can hold in the cup of your palm. Phichit decides he likes that, too, adds it to his mental list of things he’ll think about when he needs to stay warm, somewhere between the symphony of car horns outside his house every morning and his mother’s tom yum goong.

He’s told Yuuri more than once—there’s no winter where he comes from, so when he found the ice as a kid it was only a happy accident. Or maybe it’s that the ice found him, and so did every happy accident in the years since.

“There is if you go fast,” he retorts, laughing into the folds of the scarf as Yuuri balls it up and shoves it smack into his face.


	4. things I did for love

“Can I hold your hand?” Phichit had asked, after closing the door and turning the key in the lock.

“Of course,” Yuuri had answered, because it was 11 AM on the first day of summer and anyway they were only going to get ice cream sandwiches at the store.

That should have been the end of it, only Phichit had also asked “Sure?” in the elevator on the way down. It had been Yuuri who’d laced their fingers together in full view of the security camera, declaring “I’m sure” for all the mirrors to hear.

Now it’s 11:15 AM and they’re standing behind a shelf, by the chest freezers. Yuuri knows he should be concentrating on whether to get chocolate or vanilla, but he’s distracted, looking over his shoulder, wondering where he might have left his courage.

“Phichit-kun, people are _staring.”_

 _People_ meaning—who? The security guard at the doors of their building, the girl at the counter, the old lady hovering over the bars of soap on the other side of the shelf. Whoever might have driven past as they crossed the road, Yuuri’s right hand in Phichit’s left, his cheeks warm, the inside of his palm already damp.

“They’re not,” Phichit says. He doesn’t even look up. “But so what if they are? They’re probably just jealous of you, Yuuri.”

It’s a joke, but it’s also true. That’s what settles Yuuri in the end, as Phichit grins and rolls open the freezer to take one chocolate and one vanilla, as he leads the way to the counter. He waves at the old lady, makes more small talk than is strictly necessary with the girl (“I’m good, Katie, how are you? You keep cool in this weather, ‘kay?”), pays for their ice cream with a wrinkled five-dollar bill he digs out of the back pocket of his jeans. All one-handed, because the other hand is thoroughly occupied.

 _They’re probably just jealous of you, Yuuri._ Well, who wouldn’t be?

That should be the end of it. Only later (it must be past 11:30 now, maybe even closer to noon), halfway across the pedestrian lane, he changes his tune. “You know what, I think I was wrong.”

“Hmm?”

Phichit squeezes their fingers together, and that smile—it hasn’t left his face, really, since he asked to hold hands. And while Yuuri knows Phichit’s smiles are sweeter and more ubiquitous than ice cream sandwiches—and freely given, at that, to everyone he meets—part of him is already going back over those last thirty minutes, searching for clues that this, this is _different._ Maybe even _special._

“It was me,” Phichit says. “They were probably jealous of me,” and Yuuri melts to hear it, laughing, flushed and wide-mouthed under the midday sun.


	5. things we shared before sunrise

Phichit finds Yuuri at the dining table, waiting for the sun to come up. There’s one last apple in the bowl on the kitchen counter.

It’s the first thing Phichit notices when he comes out of their bedroom in his pajamas and his bare feet, too alert considering the time. There had been a sale on apples at the supermarket last week—a pound for a dollar, keeps the doctor away, and so on—and Phichit had remembered reading somewhere that apples were better for waking up in the morning than coffee. Now there’s just the one left, so it must be true.

The wall clock reads 5 AM, Wednesday, June 24. The season starts up again exactly a week from today and neither of them can sleep. Yuuri is prone to this, but so is Phichit sometimes—the fluttering in the stomach, the racing heart. The sudden, nagging feeling that he needs to do something with his hands without knowing what.

They wait together, each on the edge of the other’s silence, watching the sky. Yuuri sits still, but Phichit must move, turn his attention toward things he can see and touch. So he focuses on the apple and on doing what he’s been taught: lay down a cutting board, pass the fruit under running water. Slice in half and scoop out the core. Cut the halves into quarters, the quarters into eighths. Serve.

The skin is rosy, pale yellow near the base. There are good things, he’s been told, in the skin. You don’t peel it off and throw it away.

When Phichit joins Yuuri at the table, he sets the plate between them and says only, “Here.”

“Thank you.” Yuuri smiles. He takes the first piece between his fingertips, delicate and tender, and when he lifts it to his lips Phichit sees the dawn break.


	6. things only you know about me

“He’s always been a handful,” Phichit’s mother tells Yuuri, like a secret. “But you take such good care of him.”

The regular LINE calls typically come over breakfast in Detroit, dinner in Bangkok—but today she’s early, and Phichit’s just jumped in the shower. They both know he’ll be in there ten minutes at least, give or take another ten to complete his skincare routine.

Yuuri holds Phichit’s phone upright in one hand; the other scrubs at the back of his head as he smiles at the screen, sheepish. “It’s nothing, Dara-san. To be honest, most days it feels like he’s the one taking care of me.”

Dara’s laugh is the kind that sparkles— _like his does,_ Yuuri thinks. He’s thought this from the first moment he heard it ring out in their room, distant as it was then, fractured by the spotty connection. It’s no surprise at all that he thinks it still. _Exactly like his._

“I’m sure it feels that way. That boy, he’ll never say it, but—Isra! Isra, stop, stop!” Dara half-rises, brings the phone down and barks a few words at the twins in Thai. He can’t see Isra and Chati in-frame—they’re ten this year, he remembers, born in May, which in Thailand is midsummer—but he can hear their footsteps and their bubbling giggles, Isra shrieking. When she settles down on the couch again a few strands have come loose from her ponytail. “Sorry. Moving was so hard for him, you know, last year. I don’t know if he’s told you.”

Before—more than a year ago, almost two—Phichit had complained, laughing all the while, of so many things. The cold, the food, how they never gave you enough of those stupidly small hot sauce packets for your pizza. Never the tall buildings, though, or the wide roads, or the cars.

Now he understands all the different ways Phichit means it when he says he skates for Thailand. There’s the flag embroidered on the breast of his jacket, red and white stripes and the broad swathe of dark blue in the middle. And then there’s his house, and his midsummer twins, and this woman who holds it all safe in her hand for her eldest son, even as her eyes chase him across the ocean.

“We haven’t talked about it yet,” Yuuri says. “But I know, don’t worry.”


	7. things we did before you got married

After two years’ absence, it seems only right to return to Motor City behind the wheel.

“You know how to get to the hotel?”

Phichit’s fingers drum idly against the wheel in time to whatever’s playing on the radio in the rental car—the jingle, now, for some detergent ad. He punches the button for another station, thinks _Should’ve brought an aux cord._ “It’s not far now. Two streets away from our old building. We used to pass it on the way to school, remember?”

“I remember,” Yuuri answers, smiling. Then something new seems to come to him, some new worry, and his brow wrinkles up the way it’s always done, his glasses slipping down his nose. “And the church?”

“Already looked it up,” Phichit tells him. After a pause, dutifully, he answers the unasked question: “We’ll be fine.”

Their two tuxedos swing now inside their garment bags from the hook above the backseat. There’s a map attached to the wedding invitation in Yuuri’s backpack, tucked carefully between the pages of his planner so as not to crease the marble cardstock, disturb the handmade lace snowflakes glued across the front. They’d had a good laugh on the flight here from Tokyo—about how Laura from the rink must have done so well for herself these past two years, and now they had no choice but to step up their planning game.

(“If this wedding’s anything like the invite says it’ll be, she’s set the bar high. Don’t test me,” Phichit had warned. “Don’t test Victor.” Yuuri had cracked up and slumped low in his seat with his hands over his face, moaning about how he could already foresee being ganged up on by his best man and his fiancé.)

They pass a McDonald’s on their left, an art museum on their right. Yuuri has his nose pressed nearly to the glass as he scans the streets outside, reading the signs— _Willis, Canfield E, Garfield, Forest Ave._ Phichit wonders if they look foreign to him again, after so much time away. Or does he still recognize this place?

“Yuuri, we _lived_ here. I know midtown as well as I know you.”

“I _know_ that,” Yuuri murmurs. Phichit recognizes the look on his face when he turns away from the window, the lines still creasing his forehead, the crooked half-smile that says he’s embarrassed by his own nervousness. He’s seen exactly that look—exactly this image of Yuuri in the passenger seat—from the driver’s seat of a different car, many, many times. “I just wanted to be sure.”

Some things, Phichit thinks, never leave a person. Somehow, they’ve always known the way.

“Be sure,” he says, reaches across to scrunch Yuuri in the ribs—and laughs, loud and long at the next red light, when Yuuri catches his hand and doesn’t let go.


End file.
